'Food Glorious Food': A tasty treat? Share your verdict

For Pop Idol, he gave us X Factor. For Opportunity Knocks, he gave us Britain's Got Talent. And now following the incredible success of The Great British Bake Off, Simon Cowell has brought us Food Glorious Food.

Featuring ex-MasterChef host and supermarket sauce-flogger Loyd Grossman, a fierce-looking woman from the WI, a Geordie lady with a beehive the size of a beer barrel, and posho foodie fop Tom Parker Bowles, the show is on the hunt for Britain's best dish to sell on the shelves at Marks & Spencer.

In the same way that The X Factor is more about the pantomime between the judges and the "journey" of the contestants, Food Glorious Food is focused on eccentric characters and ladled-on emotional stories. Actual cooking was at a bare minimum.

An inherent flaw in the format appears to stem from its final prize - the chance to be stocked in M&S. There are obvious restrictions in what can and can't be sold en masse in a supermarket, so this isn't really the search for Britain's best dish, it's a hunt for a best dish that can be packaged up and reheated easily.

It was good to hear Grossman's hilarious drawl on TV again, Geordie judge Stacie Stewart has an amusing Northern bluntness, and although the show does feel like a mash-up of other food show formats (Britain's Best Dish, MasterChef, Great British Bake Off), it was all tweaked, buffed and polished enough to get away with it.

Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood can probably rest easy - Glorious Food can't match Bake Off for infectious charm - but this is by no means the disaster that it could have been when it was initially billed as 'The Eggs Factor' by the tabloid press and images of Louis Walsh shouting at teenage chefs burning sponge puddings appeared in my head.